[j-nsp] Drawbacks when using QFX5100 and EX4300 in mixed VCF mode

Kurt Bales kwbales at kwbales.net
Thu Aug 21 10:19:49 EDT 2014


The corner case for QFX3500 is that it is still the only Juniper switch
with native FC support, though most others have good FCoE transport support.

Regards,

Kurt Bales
@networkjanitor JNCIE-ENT #368



On Thu, Aug 21, 2014 at 6:07 AM, Pavel Lunin <plunin at senetsy.ru> wrote:

> 19.08.2014 19:51, Sebastian Wiesinger wrote:
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Hardware Requirements for a Virtual Chassis Fabric
> >
> > A VCF can contain up to four devices configured as spines, and up to
> > twenty total devices.
> >
> > All spine devices must be QFX5100 devices. We recommend optimizing the
> > performance of your VCF by also configuring QFX5100 devices as your
> > leaf devices. A non-mixed VCF has the highest port density and feature
> > support for a VCF. Nevertheless, you can configure any combination of
> > QFX5100, QFX3600, QFX3500, or EX4300 devices into leaf devices within
> > your VCF.
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Any idea what they are talking about? What drawbacks does a mixed VCF
> > have in practice?
> >
> > One thing seems to be that you lose the ability to have output filters
> > on interfaces but that's all I know.
> >
>
> I guess, there is a lot of marketing here. Of course, many features are
> scaled down to the so-called "least-common denominator", as guys have
> already mentioned above. But this is quite not surprising and doesn't
> mean you must use a more featured product everywhere just because it's
> more featured.
>
> What about QFX3500, AFAIK, there's just no point to use them at all as
> from the price/performance/features perspective QFX5100 is just better
> except maybe some corner-cases (which I am not aware of). Using QFX3600
> as leafs when spines are QFX5100 is non-reasonable from the pure
> performance PoV as QFX3600 is a 40GE switch and QFX5100 is 10GE. What
> about EX4300—of course any vendor would say you better buy 10GE switches
> instead of 1GE just because 10GE switches have much more performance.
> And this is totally correct, isn't it? ;)
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